As noted earlier, a federal court in Washington state is considering whether the names and address of people who sign a Referendum petition, for the purpose of blocking a civil unions law from taking effect, should be considered public or private. On July 29, the judge had issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Secretary of State from releasing the names and addresses to the public.
On August 5, a group that wants to see the names and addresses of people who signed Initiative 1033 asked the Court to intervene. I-1033 advocates limits on taxes. The National Education Association wants to see who signed that petition. The Washington Coalition for Open Government supports the position that the petitions should be public. It makes an interesting analogy. If a bill were introduced in the legislature, the legislators who sponsored the bill would, of course, be identified. The analogy says that in the initiative and/or referendum process, it is particular voters who sign the petition who are sponsoring a “bill” (by analogy), and so they should be identified publicly as well.
The lawsuit is Protect Marriage Washington v Reed.
Interesting, but still would like to learn more about it. Love the article! :-).
I can’t imagine how the petitioning process can protect the rights of all while meeting the needs of the minority if the contents of the petitions (the signatures/ who has signed the petition) is not public. In this case, “the majority” are understood as the current law or situation. “The minority” are those who seek to change the current via a referendum.
I have personally ben a part of two petition projects, where we reviewed petitions, and in both cases, we were able to find enough “bad” signatures, that in both cases, the petitioners ended up without enough signatures to get the measure on the ballot. In both cases, the petitions contained duplicate names, names of people who were not registered voters, as well as ficticious names and characters. This distinction is somewhat important too. “Jim Smith” may be a real person who lives at the address listed, and so he may really be for the referendum, but if he isn’t a registered voter- even though he is a real person, he has opted out of having a voice at the ballot box, which is the primary way we each participate in our democratic process. That is a very different case than when “Daffy Duck” signs the petition, but there is no actual person named Daffy Duck at that address. In both cases, the signature should not be counted, but they represent two different scenarios. In the Jim Smith case, it suggests that the purpose of the petition may be seen as a valid purpose, but in the second, it demonstrates fraud on the part of the organization or group that collected the signatures. Names may also be valid- in that they are registered voters and they really signed the petition, but they were misled as to what they were signing. So, a person running out of the grocery store is asked to sign something and given the impression by the petition collector that it is a signature in favor of something when in fact it is just the opposite.
All three of these situations deserve to be and must be pointed out and contested. If the petitions do not become public, then it is up to the Secretary of the State to do that, an impossible task with limited state personnel. And because the Secretary of the State may be a partisan politician, it may not be in their best interests to do this fully objectively. At lower levels of government such as city or county, it is even more of a problem, as there is even less staff to handle these tasks. If petition signatures are not open to the public, fraud will reign supreme.
In California, elections officials at the county level manage to verify millions of signatures in any given election year (on initiative petitions). And California has a very strict policy that petitions are not public. The policy is so strong, California won’t even let the very group that submitted a petition look at it later on. When a group that had submitted a petition one year wanted to look at its own petitions the following year to get the names and addresses, the state refused, and the state courts upheld that refusal. The group went all the way to the US Supreme Court, but the US Supreme Court wouldn’t hear it. Bilofsky v Deukmejian, 124 Cal App 3d 825 (1981).
Any petitions trying to make the U.S.A. some British colonies again — so everybody can bow down and kiss the foot of the British monarch ???
Trying to have a Stalin / Hitler clone to have all political power in the U.S.A. ???
Trying to make AAAZZZ religion the only religion in the U.S.A. ???
Get the drift ??? — some minority idea stuff is INTOLERABLE to most folks — with the minority at a direct risk of being killed, beat up, etc.
P.R. NOW – to lessen the need for extremist petitions.